The Mountain Between Us (13 page)

All that those years of nursing the old hurt of her marriage had gotten her was another kind of pain. When she was young, she'd thought life would get easier as she got older and gained experience and wisdom. So much for that belief. She could shelve that one right up there with the idea that eating grapefruit made you lose weight or that tanning was good for your skin. All she had to count on now was whatever was in front of her at the moment. Which was an almost empty bank account and not a lot of ideas for filling it up.

C
HAPTER EIGHT

T
he first week in November, Olivia collected her supplies and reported to the Last Dollar. “I'm ready to start on the mural,” she told Danielle, who was manning the front counter.

“Super. We took everything off the back wall for you, but let us know if there's anything else you need.”

Olivia had half expected the women to tell her they'd changed their minds. They didn't want an amateur like her messing with their restaurant. Trying to ignore the half a dozen diners who watched as she made her way to the back of the room, she set down her plastic tote of paints and brushes, and studied the blank wall before her. It looked a lot bigger than she remembered. Bigger than anything else she'd ever worked on, for sure; she was used to painting T-shirts and jewelry, not whole walls.

She took a deep breath. “You can do this,” she whispered. She'd work on one section at a time. First up, sketch in the miner. She selected a pencil from her supplies, consulted the sketch she'd roughed out on a piece of notebook paper, and went to work.

Once the figure began to take shape beneath her hand, she forgot about the diners watching or her worries about making the piece perfect. With the rough outline in place, she picked up a paintbrush, eager to see her idea fleshed out with color. At some point in the morning, Janelle brought her a glass of iced tea, and Danielle found a stool for her to lean against as she worked.

By lunchtime, the rough shape of the miner had emerged from the wall. “Well, look at that,” a familiar voice behind her observed. “You've got talents besides putting a nice head on a mug of beer.”

“Don't overdo the flattery, Bob. It's liable to go to my head.”

“I was trying to be nice, so don't give me any of your smart mouth.”

Was he really hurt, or just a good actor? Maybe a little of both. “Then, thank you,” she said.

“This fellow looks pretty good.” He took a step over to study the figure from a different angle. “You want me to get my costume from the Founders' Pageant and pose for you?” he asked.

“Why would I want you to do that?” she asked.

“It's clear as day that's me there in that drawing.” He pointed to the sketch she'd tacked onto the wall.

Janelle paused on the way to refill water glasses at a table across the room. “I don't think it looks like you, Bob,” she said. “The man in the picture is much younger than you.”

He leaned closer and squinted at the drawing. “Of course it's me. You done a good job of capturing me in my prime. You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I was a handsome devil. I made a real hit with the ladies.”

“But, of course,” Janelle said, and winked at Olivia.

Olivia turned back to her drawing, hiding her smile from Bob. “How's the snowfall betting going?” she asked.

“Don't let the state hear you call it betting,” he said. “To them that means gambling, and gambling is illegal unless you buy a license and give them their cut. This here is a contest with a donation.”

“We've raised $250 so far.” Danielle joined them.

“A drop in the bucket compared to all we lost,” Bob said. “That won't even pay the diesel for one day of snowplowing.”

“So you think we're going to need snowplows this year?” Olivia asked. She thought of D. J., who was sitting idle, waiting for his first day of work. Lucas said he'd saved all the money he'd made in Iraq and was living off that.

“Oh, the snow'll get here sooner or later,” Bob said. “And we'll need money to pay for plowing, not to mention streetlights and the library and maintenance and all the other things it takes to run even a little town. The town council and the mayor all agreed to waive their salaries, but since we pay 'em little or nothing as it is, that didn't help much.”

“Any word on where that bastard Pershing ran off to?” Olivia asked.

“Not yet,” Bob said. “But Reggie told me he asked a private detective he knows to follow his trail.”

“I hope he rots in jail the rest of his life when they do find him,” Danielle said. Olivia stared. Danielle was known for never saying an unkind word about anyone. She'd even been known to express sympathy for Cassie Wynock. She flushed now. “Well, it was horrible what he did to poor Lucille. And, of course, it was awful about the money.”

“May not be much chance of him doing any jail time,” Bob said. “People are saying if we handed the money over willingly, we can't charge him with stealing.”

“I thought he talked the bank clerk into paying out more than the city authorized,” Olivia said.

“He did, but nobody can prove that. We don't have anything in writing.”

Olivia turned back to the mural, carefully sketching in the miner's hands. How dumb could these people get? Even she'd know not to hand over a bunch of money to a man who was practically a stranger, especially without a written record. Which didn't mean she thought her mother was stupid, but it had surprised her that someone her mother's age would be so gullible.

“I know what you're thinking,” Bob said over her shoulder. “That we're all a bunch of dumb hicks. And maybe we were a little naïve. But the guy knew what he was doing. He knew just what to say to make us trust him. And he was a friend of your mom's.”

She nodded. There was that. Everyone in town loved Lucille, so of course they'd loved Gerald, too.

“How's your mom doing?” Danielle asked.

Olivia leaned back against the stool. “She's sick over all of this.” Guilt over the money was easy to understand, but Olivia knew something else was going on. Lucille was ashamed because she'd slept with Gerald and let him lead her on. Instead of blaming him for being a gold-plated bastard, she was faulting herself for not seeing through him.

“Well, you tell your mama when we do find Pershing, I've got some ideas for dealing with him,” Bob said.

She could only imagine what back-country revenge Bob had planned. “I'll be sure to tell her.”

“D. J. said he knows a hit man with the CIA who could take him out for us,” Bob said.

She almost dropped her pencil. “D. J. said that?”

Bob nodded. “He sounded serious, too. He met some bad dudes over there in Iraq, I take it. I told him as much as it would please me to know the man was no longer around, it's more important to get our money back. Or as much of it as we can.”

“I don't see how you're going to do that,” Danielle said.

“I told you, I have some ideas. You tell your mother to stop worrying. I'm going to take care of things.”

He sounded so certain, but what could Bob—who was known for his outlandish ideas—do to stop a professional con man like Gerald?

After Olivia had finished sketching in the miner, she headed home to eat supper before her late shift at the Dirty Sally. She found Lucille in the kitchen, staring at the directions on the back of a box of macaroni as if they were written in a foreign language. Olivia took the box from her hand. “Sit down, let me do that,” she said.

Lucille sat. Or rather, she drooped into a chair. “Lucas is upstairs doing homework,” she said.

“That's good.” Olivia turned on the burner under the pot of water for the macaroni. “I saw Bob Prescott down at the Last Dollar. He said he's working on a plan to get the town's money back.”

“Bob's always got a plan for something,” Lucille said. “He means well, but usually his plans don't work out.”

“At least he's trying.” Which was more than she could say for her mother; Lucille seemed to have given up.

“Believe me, I'd get the money back if I could.”

“I'm not talking about the money.” She turned, her back to the stove. “I'm talking about snapping out of it. So the guy talked you into bed and left you without so much as a kiss good-bye. It happens. Men are bastards. Life is easier if you just accept that.”

Lucille scowled at her. “How did you turn out to be so cynical? Did I do that to you?”

“Life did that to me.”

“I'm not so sure.” Lucille picked up the salt shaker and rolled it between her palms. “After your father left I was pretty down on men. I think I passed that on to you.”

“We're not talking about me. We're talking about you and Gerald. Quit grieving over him. He's not worth it.”

“You think I'm grieving over him?” Lucille set down the shaker with a thump.

“Aren't you?”

“No, we had one night. And, yes, it was a good night. But I wasn't in love with him.”

“Then why are you so upset?”

She sighed. “Shame. Embarrassment that I let my guard down. Guilt over what I've done to this town I love.”

“The town council voted to give Gerald the money, not you.”

“But they listened to him because I asked them to . . . because I vouched for him.”

“But any two of the four could have disagreed and the money would still be sitting in the bank. So stop blaming yourself. Have you noticed no one else in town is? I haven't heard one person express anything but sympathy at the way you were taken in.” It was amazing, really. She'd fully expected at least some people to come down hard on her mother—call for her resignation, maybe even sue her in court. Maybe folks grumbled in private, but even down at the Dirty Sally, second home to some of the worst curmudgeons in town, no one blamed Lucille.

“The sympathy's almost worse than anger. It makes me look pathetic and dumb.”

“You're not dumb, but you're beginning to act pretty pathetic.”

“I'm older and I don't bounce back from hurt the way I used to. Don't make the same mistake I did, Olivia.”

“I'll keep that in mind if I ever meet any slick-talking rich guys.”

“I'm not talking about Gerald. The mistake I made was that I wasted so many years keeping to myself when I could have found a good man. And there are some out there. I didn't have to spend all those nights alone . . . I chose to, for fear of being hurt. It was all such a waste.”

The words surprised Olivia. Her mother had always been so independent, not needing anyone. “Are you saying any man is better than no man at all?”

“I'm saying we should take advantage of the opportunities that come to us and not hold ourselves back out of fear. If I'd had relationships with men all along, I might not have been so susceptible to Gerald's flattery. I might have learned to protect myself better. Or maybe I'd have already been involved and wouldn't even have been a target.”

“I guess that's one way to look at it.” Olivia turned back to the stove and dumped the package of macaroni in the pot of now-boiling water. She'd certainly thrown herself into dating after D. J. left—not that it had helped any.

“You know my secrets, now tell me yours,” Lucille said. “What happened with D. J.?”

She stiffened. “You already know what happened. I loved him. I thought we'd get married, have children together. Instead, he decided to go to Iraq.”

“Did you tell him how you felt?”

“He didn't ask. He just made this announcement that he'd taken this job and would be gone for six months to a year. What I wanted didn't matter.” She'd waited for him to ask her opinion, to say something that would provide her an opening to tell him she didn't want him to leave, but he'd presented the idea as a done deal. He was going and what she wanted didn't matter.

“If you'd asked, he might have stayed.”

Old anger flared. “I wasn't going to beg him. We lived together. We slept together every night. If he didn't know how I felt after all that, words weren't going to make any difference.”

“Sometimes words do make a difference.” Lucille's voice was gentle. “People make mistakes. I made a big one with Gerald. I think D. J. knows he made one with you.”

“It's not just that he left.”

“What else, then?”

Olivia hadn't told anyone the “what else.” But maybe unburdening herself would help heal the wound. And she could trust her mother not to blab to anyone else. She glanced toward the stairs—no sign of Lucas. She lowered her voice. “I was pregnant when he left.”

“A baby? But—”

“I miscarried two weeks after he left.” The words sounded so stark, the first time she'd said them out loud. “D. J. never knew.”

“Oh, Olivia.” The two words carried all the sorrow and pain of a mother for her child. To Olivia, they were better than a warm embrace. “How awful for you,” Lucille continued. “But if he didn't know, you can't blame him—”

“He should have known!” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, angry that she could still cry after all this time. “I'd been throwing up every morning for a week, and I even told him I'd missed my period. The man isn't dumb. He ought to be able to put two and two together. Instead, he runs off to Iraq.”

“So you think he did know and he left anyway?”

She nodded, swallowing more tears. “How can you trust someone who's hurt you that way?” she whispered.

“That does take courage.” Lucille's eyes met her daughter's. “But you've never been a coward, have you?”

“Neither have you.”

Lucille nodded. “You're right. So we'll get through this. I've got to stop focusing on the past and think about the future. Since no one will let me resign as mayor, I guess I've got to pull myself together and run the town, even if we are broke.”

“You've got a lot of people on your side. That counts for something.”